By Nick Bryant
Prince Andrew in 2017. Despite his banishment, he remains a significant historical figure precisely because his life signifies so much about Britain’s post-war history.Credit:Getty images
His Royal Highness was a happy His Royal Highness. The interview, he thought, had gone great. His decision to subject himself to interrogation had been vindicated. The fears of his chief spin doctor, who had stepped down in protest at the decision to go ahead with the interview, were unfounded.
When the questions came to an end, Prince Andrew even gave the production team a tour of Buckingham Palace – a regal version of a victory lap. He seemed to be experiencing an adrenalin buzz, and was extraordinarily chatty. Pointing to a statue of the 19th century’s Prince Albert, he said: “next time you come, we should talk about him. What a wonderful entrepreneur.”
Clearly, he thought he had acquitted himself with gentlemanly aplomb. Viewers of the BBC interview would surely accept his explanation for maintaining his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even after the American billionaire had been convicted of sex offences involving underage girls: that it was because of a “tendency to be too honourable”.
“This was Andrew unfettered, Andrew raw and Andrew as himself,” says Peter Hunt, the BBC’s former Royal correspondent. “That’s why he thought it had gone well, because he presented himself as he is. The problem was that viewers didn’t like what they saw.”
During the interview, Prince Andrew claimed not to recall ever meeting Virginia Giuffre, his Australia-based accuser, who alleges that he sexually assaulted her on three separate occasions starting when she was just 17 – accusations he continues to deny. But viewers thought his answers tested the bounds of plausibility. There were the claims about being at the restaurant chain Pizza Express in Woking, south-west of London, which would have meant slumming it for a royal; and of not being able to perspire, when pictures immediately emerged showing him wearing shirts drenched with sweat.
Then there were the plummy soliloquies that made him sound like he had stepped from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. “Do I regret the fact that he has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming?” he asked in relation to Epstein, a serial paedophile.
“Unbecoming?” replied the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, in an incredulous voice that instantly transported us back to the 21st century and the era of #MeToo.
Finally, there were the words left unsaid. At no stage did the Prince express any sympathy for Epstein’s victims. Though he affected the air of a powder-wigged aristocrat being carried through the streets in a sedan chair, he had been at the wheel of his own car crash, a head-on collision with himself. From that moment on, to many of her subjects if not yet the Queen, he was royal roadkill.
Even though he was only second in line to the throne for the first 22 years of his life – in the royal pecking order, he had displaced his older sister with his first gulp of air – Prince Andrew never had to worry about status anxiety when it came to his mother. Whereas the Queen was distracted by her new monarchical duties when Prince Charles and Princess Anne were infants – they were aged just three and 17 months old when she ascended to the throne – Her Majesty decided to take a step back when Prince Andrew was born on February 19, 1960. By now, she was eight years into her reign, and although a lot of everyday parental duties were outsourced to a governess, the Queen spent more time with her second son than her first.
Whereas Charles could often seem tortured and tormented – the curse of the heir as opposed to the “spare”, to use the patois of primogeniture – Andrew was far more fun and straightforward. He also came along when the Queen and Prince Philip were thought to have rebooted their relationship, and thus became the happier son of a happier marriage. From an early age, he was seen as her favoured son.
For his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, Andrew was a royals’ kind of royal. Rather than doing anything quite as namby-pamby as studying archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, the academic path that Charles decided to take, Andrew enlisted in the armed forces. Like his father, he went on to become an officer in the Royal Navy. Like his father, he became a full and enthusiastic participant in military life. Like his father, he became a “playboy Prince”, quickly earning the tabloid moniker “Randy Andy” for a string of dalliances, including one with the American actor Koo Stark, whose work included the semi-erotic film, Emily.
Not only was Andrew a family and Fleet Street favourite, in the early 1980s, he became a national hero. Adhering to the heraldic principle that the crown and people should fight alongside each other at times of war, Prince Andrew joined the British task force that set sail for the South Atlantic in April 1982, to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina.
Piloting his Sea King helicopter from the flagship of the flotilla, the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, the 22-year-old flew three to four hours a day, acting mainly as a decoy for Exocet missiles, the Argentinians’ most dangerous weapon. In what he described afterwards as his “most frightening moment of the war”, an Argentinian shell came perilously close to blowing up his helicopter.
Not only was Andrew a family and Fleet Street favourite, in the early 1980s he became a national hero.
When the Argentinians surrendered, and the Union flag was again hoisted over the Falklands, Prince Andrew made it to the capital, Port Stanley, found a phone, and managed to patch through a call to Buckingham Palace. “She was quite surprised to hear from me,” he said of the 15-minute phone call with his mother. “She asked to pass on how proud she was of everyone, and to say how marvellously all the troops had done.”
The conflict showed that the Royal Navy could still dispatch gunboats to successfully defend far-flung outposts of what remained of the British empire, and that Britannia still ruled at least some of the waves. When HMS Invincible returned to Portsmouth in September, amid a sea of Union flags and a bevy of bare-chested women bobbing around in boats, the Queen joined thousands of her subjects to greet him. With her she brought a camera, so she could take snapshots of the reunion, and also a basket of red roses, which she handed out to the sailors. Andrew joyfully clenched the flower between his teeth, as if he was about to perform the tango.
This happy moment demonstrated both the love of the monarch for her favourite son, and the adoration of the nation towards its favourite prince. “Nobody called him ‘Randy Andy’, a prince whose only claim to fame was his preference for blue-eyed blondes,” wrote a reporter at the time. “Now it’s Andrew the Warrior Prince, a hero home from the wars.”
More cheers and celebrations were in the offing. At an event at Windsor Castle during Royal Ascot in 1985, Princess Diana introduced her brother-in-law to a childhood friend, a bouncy redhead called Sarah Ferguson. “Fergie”, the daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh’s polo manager, Major Ronald Ferguson, was an immediate hit not just with Andrew, but the family as a whole. Unlike Diana, who hated holidays at Balmoral, Fergie mucked in and joined in the family fun, whether it was riding, shooting or open-carriage driving, Prince Philip’s favourite pastime. For a Sloane Ranger, she also had a usefully populist touch. Soon even commoners in Britain were mimicking Fergie’s trademark expression: “Absolutely.”
There was much royal rejoicing, then, when the couple announced their engagement in 1986, with a photoshoot on the lawns of Buckingham Palace that involved none of the cufflink-twiddling awkwardness of Charles and Diana’s coming out five years hitherto. From Andrew, there was no equivalent of his elder brother’s angst-ridden “whatever ‘in love’ means” moment when asked about his feelings by reporters. Instead, he displayed the same horsey grin as the day he returned from the Falklands.
More than 500 million viewers tuned in for the couple’s wedding at Westminster Abbey that summer, a day that offered further proof of the Queen’s favouritism towards her second son. As a wedding gift, she bestowed upon him a new title, the Duke of York: the dukedom of her beloved father, George VI, and also her grandfather King George V.
Andrew and Fergie were beloved of the monarch, beloved of her British subjects, and beloved of the Fleet Street tabloids. The trifecta. What could possibly go wrong?
Of the Queen’s 70 years on the throne, 1992 was surely her worst. Her annus horribilis, as she called it, included the publication of Andrew Morton’s tell-all biography of Princess Diana (essentially a thinly veiled autobiography), the separation of Charles and Di, the divorce of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips and the fire at Windsor Castle that destroyed more than 100 rooms, during which Prince Andrew heroically helped save precious artwork from the flames.
But the first scandal out of the royal gates that year came in January, and centred upon the Duchess of York. Compromising pictures were published of Fergie with her American paramour, the Texas millionaire Steve Wyatt, while her husband was away at sea. Not long afterwards, with the BBC famously reporting “the knives are out for Fergie at the palace”, the Yorks announced their separation.
The public low point of their marital breakdown came later that year, when photographs were published of a topless Fergie having her toes sucked by another Texan, her “financial adviser” John Bryan, as she stretched out on a sun lounger at a villa in St Tropez. “Fergie Toe-Job,” screamed The Sun, a headline that took the press coverage of the Royals into an entirely new realm. Increasingly, the Windsors were being viewed through a telephoto lens. With every gaudy tabloid splash, the mystique of the monarchy was being trashed. Disastrously for Fergie, the toe-sucking pictures were published while she was staying with the Royal family at Balmoral. “The redhead’s in trouble,” paged Princess Diana to one of her favourite Fleet Street hacks.
One lesson that Andrew might have drawn from the Fergie imbroglio was to avoid rich Americans. But just as his wife’s public fall began with her relationships with two wealthy Texans, the seeds of Andrew’s demise were sown when he met a Florida-based financier called Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew says they were introduced by his friend Ghislaine Maxwell in 1999, and that Epstein was initially her “plus one”. The trio spent time together at Windsor Castle, at the Queen’s Norfolk retreat in Sandringham, and at Balmoral. During her trial in New York – at which Maxwell was found guilty of five out of six charges, including sex trafficking a minor – a photo emerged showing her and Epstein relaxing in a log cabin on the Scottish estate. In June 2000, Epstein was even invited to the Dance of the Decades, a mother of all parties hosted by the Queen to celebrate the 40th birthday of Prince Andrew, the 50th birthday of Princess Anne, the 70th birthday of Princess Margaret and the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother.
It was during this heady phase that Virginia Giuffre claims Epstein sex-trafficked her to Prince Andrew, and that the Duke raped her. The first assault allegedly took place at the Belgravia flat of Ghislaine Maxwell in March 2001, after the socialite allegedly told her: “You’re going to dance with a prince tonight.” Further sexual assaults took place, she claims, at Epstein’s mansion close to Central Park in New York and his private island, Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands. The Prince vehemently denies this.
For years, there were rumours about Epstein’s predilection for underage girls. His Caribbean island was dubbed “Orgy Island”. His private jet, with a passenger manifest that included luminaries such as Bill Clinton, was called the “Lolita Express”. But the police only started to investigate him in 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl claimed he had molested her at his Palm Beach mansion.
Around the same time, the FBI mounted its own investigation, which culminated in a “sweetheart” plea agreement with ludicrously lenient terms. Epstein avoided a federal indictment, which could have put him behind bars for the rest of his life, and pleaded guilty to two lesser charges, including soliciting a minor for prostitution. During his 18-month prison sentence, he was allowed out on “work release” for 12 hours a day, six days a week.
After his spell in prison and his inclusion on the sex offenders register, Epstein’s powerful friends tended to give him a wide berth. But in December 2010, Prince Andrew made a four-day unofficial visit to New York during which he stayed throughout at Epstein’s mansion (despite availing himself of so much of the billionaire’s hospitality, Prince Andrew told the BBC’s Emily Maitlis that the purpose of his trip was to end their friendship).
When a team of British tabloid journalists got wind of his whereabouts, they staked out the residence. On the third day, they finally got their reward. From behind the giant oak doors of the French neoclassical townhouse, out stepped the Prince and the disgraced billionaire. Then, accompanied by royal protection officers, they went for a walk in Central Park, where they were snapped having what looked like a solemn conversation.
Two months later, in a jaw-dropping world exclusive, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid The News of the World published the photographs under the headline, “PRINCE ANDY AND THE PAEDO”. Soon, the British broadsheets also piled in, with the normally sympathetic Daily Telegraph reporting that Epstein had given £15,000 to Sarah Ferguson to help settle her debts, a payment organised by her ex-husband.
In the furore that followed, the Prince was forced to downgrade his role as a British trade envoy. The job, which he had taken after retiring from the navy in 2001, had already earned him the nickname “Air Miles Andy” and regularly embroiled him in controversy because of alleged links with shady foreign dictators and businessmen. Though British diplomats marvelled at his ability to open doors that might otherwise have remained shut, they also mocked his boorish manner and regal haughtiness. “HBH,” some called him. “His Buffoon Highness.”
It is thought he agreed to pay out £12 million (about $21.5 million) to Virginia Giuffre and a charity in support of victims’ rights.
Being grounded as a trade envoy was not the only fall-out from the News of the World scoop. Reading reports of Andrew’s meeting with Epstein at her home half a planet away in Australia, Virginia Giuffre decided that the time had come to speak out. Previously, in legal documents relating to the Epstein case, she had been referred to as Jane Doe #102. Now she wanted to tell her story to The Mail on Sunday. “I’m not sure I should be showing this to you,” the mother-of-three told the reporter, Sharon Churcher, who visited her modest bungalow on the NSW Central Coast. “He’s a British prince.” Then, she pulled from an envelope a dog-eared colour photo showing Andrew with his arm around her bare midriff. That photograph.
So began a decade-long personal crusade, which led last month to Prince Andrew agreeing to settle her civil lawsuit against him in a Lower Manhattan court. It is thought he agreed to pay out £12 million (about $21.5 million) to Virginia Giuffre and a charity in support of victims’ rights. The Prince did not admit to any wrongdoing, Nonetheless, the settlement appeared to rule out any chance of a return to public life.
Already at the start of the year, after a New York judge had refused to dismiss the case, the Queen had forced her second son to give up his military titles and royal patronages. It had also been made clear that he would not be allowed to take a prominent role in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Nor was it certain he would even be allowed to attend the upcoming memorial service for his deceased father. The Duke of York had finally been “de-royalled”.
Although Prince Andrew has now become an outlier, he is not so easily written out of the narrative, partly because his personal saga has so often mirrored the British national story. Despite his banishment, he remains a significant historical figure precisely because his life signifies so much about Britain’s post-war history.
At the end of the Falklands War, he became the poster boy for post-imperial British triumphalism. After the humiliation of the Suez crisis in the 1950s and the miserabilism of British life in the 1970s, the young pilot became central to the story Britain liked to tell itself: of how it remained a great power and a major geopolitical player.
As the curtain was lifted on the Windsors, the traditional bonds of deference between the British people and the monarchy began to fray.
Helpfully for the Windsors, Prince Andrew also reasserted the centrality of the royal family at a time when the Queen, for the first time in her reign, was no longer the dominant female figure in British life. The Falklands unleashed a surge of “Maggiemania”, and helped turn Thatcherism into a dominant political force. Andrew’s heroics in the South Atlantic – and they were heroics – helped the Royals share in her glory.
If the 1980s became synonymous with Thatcherism, then the ’90s became Britain’s tabloid decade. Andrew, again, was a central character. As the curtain was lifted on the marital problems of the Windsors, the traditional bonds of deference between the British people and the British monarchy began to fray. For the tabloids, the private lives of the Royals became interchangeable with the private lives of B-list celebrities and soap stars, whose antics were also plastered over the front pages. This only accelerated Britain’s social narrowing, and the erosion of antiquated hierarchies. Regal culture was being fused with celebrity culture at a time when celebrity culture was becoming hard to delineate from trash culture. Fame became the currency, rather than social standing – a commodity that could be devalued in an instant.
Those of us who bought the tabloids and clicked on the online stories were hardly idle royal rubberneckers. In the attention economy of the 21st century, our prurience could be monetised. More recently, Netflix has demonstrated this with its ratings juggernaut, The Crown, a highbrow drama, for sure, but one that nonetheless appeals to our baser instincts.
Despite Prince Andrew’s settlement with Giuffre, it may not be the end of the story.Credit:AAP
In the 1990s, America had also witnessed a similar process of trashy tabloidisation – Vanity Fair dubbed it “the tabloid decade”. Not only did it bring the Monica Lewinsky scandal (we truly should have called it the Bill Clinton scandal), but Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tapes, Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, the arrest of Hugh Grant on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, and John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena. Then, of course, there was Donald Trump’s much-publicised divorce from his first wife, Ivana, and his romance with Marla Maples.
In some respects, Andrew’s early relationship with Jeffrey Epstein marked the symbiosis of these trans-Atlantic tabloid worlds. They were introduced by Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, the one-time owner of the British red-top The Daily Mirror. They partied together at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida mansion. The prince and the future president.
Twenty years on, Andrew has become an avatar of British decline. After Brexit – the foreshock of Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election – the United Kingdom has become increasingly disunited. Scotland is pressing for independence. Loyalists in Northern Ireland complain that new trade regulations negotiated with Brussels have essentially erected a border in the middle of the Irish Sea that risks severing its umbilical connection to the mainland.
The handling of COVID-19 has become one of the worst public health failures in UK history. Partly because of a misplaced belief in British exceptionalism, that air of effortless superiority, the government initially adopted a fatalistic response to the pandemic at odds with most of its former European partners.
Then there’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is seen by so many of his detractors as another boorish and blimpish toff. The Downing Street parties scandal speaks of a similar born-to-rule mentality, the arrogant belief that social superiors are not bound by normal rules and laws.
Rifts in the royal family, for decades concealed from public view, were now playing out in prime time.
Even Britain’s most powerful police officer, Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recently announced she was stepping down. Her force was perpetually engulfed in controversy, including accusations that officers did not properly investigate whether the prime minister had broken the law by breaching his own COVID guidelines.
Nor is Prince Andrew the only royal problem child. Though not as damaging to the Windsors as his BBC Newsnight interview, Harry and Meghan’s sit down with Oprah nonetheless torpedoed them beneath the waterline, especially the allegations of racism. Rifts in the royal family, for decades concealed from public view, were now playing out in primetime.
All the pillars of the British establishment seem either to be wobbling, swaying or toppling over. In a complete upending, Charles and Camilla, whose extra-marital affair did so much to rock the monarchy 30 years ago, now appear before us as Corinthian columns of stability.
Since the announcement that Prince Andrew settled his civil suit with Virginia Giuffre, it has been astonishing to see how much newsprint has been devoted to the question of whether he can mount a comeback, a debatable point that can surely be dealt with in a single word. The more pertinent issue is why it took so long for him to be exiled from public life.
Prince Andrew has repeatedly been the beneficiary of his mother’s adoration and tolerance. In August 2019, on the morning after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jailhouse cell– and just days after the unsealing of court documents in New York which again brought Virginia Giuffre’s accusations to the fore – Prince Andrew sat alongside the Queen on the back seat of her Rolls-Royce on the drive to Sunday service in Balmoral. This was widely interpreted as a monarchical show of solidarity.
Prince Charles and Prince William are claimed to have been the driving force behind the move to strip Andrew of his titles. Few Royal watchers think the Queen would have acted unilaterally. As the BBC’s Peter Hunt puts it: “Buckingham Palace officials have tried for years to put him in a box, but the Queen has always given him a key to get out.”
Her Majesty has become such a transcendent figure in British life that Andrew’s travails have done little to harm her personally. As reward for her tireless decades of service, and in recognition of the manner in which she has carried out her duties, the Queen enjoys something nearing papal infallibility when it comes to dispensing her royal prerogatives. The announcement just days after the settlement that she had tested positive for COVID will have inoculated her further.
But there has been collateral damage for the institution of the monarchy, especially over the lack of transparency in how the multimillion-pound settlement is being financed. The royal purse has always been something of an Achilles heel, and eyebrows were raised when it emerged that the Queen might have to draw money from the Duchy of Lancaster estate to help foot the bill.
The ongoing criminal investigation into associates of Jeffrey Epstein potentially puts [Prince Andrew] in more jeopardy because it is led by some of America’s most ferocious prosecutors.
The hope in Buckingham Palace is that her jubilee year will now proceed without any further distractions – had the civil case not been settled, Prince Andrew would have had to sit for a video-taped deposition, which ran the risk of another Newsnight-like car crash. But the end of Virginia Giuffre’s civil suit does not necessarily bring closure. My sense, when I covered the Andrew saga for the BBC from New York, was that the civil case was the lesser of his legal worries, partly because it could be dealt with in an out-of-court settlement.
The ongoing criminal investigation into associates of Jeffrey Epstein potentially puts him in more jeopardy because it is led by some of America’s most ferocious prosecutors. Already, they have pursued a successful prosecution against Ghislaine Maxwell, and have been very public in their demands for Andrew to agree to be questioned. This he promised to do in his BBC interview, but months afterwards New York prosecutors publicly bemoaned his “zero cooperation” – a characterisation his legal team contests.
Nor has Giuffre been silenced. Gloria Allred, one of the most prominent lawyers of the #MeToo era, is adamant that Andrew’s accuser could still potentially testify against him in the event of criminal proceedings.
In the era of #MeToo, and the age of the internet, the Prince Andrew scandal has ultimately demonstrated a massive power shift, from the mighty to the marginalised, from men who once seemed unassailable to their female accusers. Andrew’s life, from the tabloid scandals onwards, provides a case study in how impossible it has become even for the rich, powerful and royal to control the narrative. This princely psychodrama will continue to play out. However much the Windsors would like to hide the Queen’s second son away, the prerogative of cancellation is no longer within their gift.
Nick Bryant worked for the BBC for 27 years, most recently in New York, before leaving the broadcaster last year. He now lives in Sydney.
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